If you want to see the future of California, look no further than Salinas. That’s the assertion of a four month reporting project by the journalism non-profit Zocalo Public Square. It’s called Salinas: California’s Richest Poor City.
Joe Mathews is California editor at Zocalo Public Square. In a recent interview about the project, he said his job takes him all over the state, and every time he comes to Salinas, he’s confounded by the city.
Joe Mathews (JM): You know, lots of places have problems. There are lots of places that are poor in California, and you often see resignation. I never saw much resignation in Salinas. So what’s confounding about is it doesn’t feel so bad to be there, but when you look at Salinas in the numbers and rankings in crime, and public health and various other measures. It’s really down or at or near the bottom.
He calls the numbers nightmarish. The murder rate that’s four times higher than the national average. Salinas’ higher than average unemployment rate and obesity rates among children well above the state average.
Mathews writes if you care about California you should care about Salinas.
JM: Because it’s a poor place, but California is a poor place. It’s got a lot of poor places in it, and I think Salinas because of its strengths: location, it’s not in the middle of nowhere, it’s not in some inland desert. It has a lot of advantages, it has history, it has engaged citizens, it has a lot of strengths, so if Salinas can’t have a much better next twenty years, I think it will be much harder for other poorer places in the state to do as well.
I asked him if through this project he found any reason why the next 20 years would be different?
JM: If I were betting, I would bet that the next twenty years will be different. I think where Salinas is situated, there are pluses and minuses to being situated close to very prosperous places, but it’s not hard to see the ways in which people priced out of the Bay Area and the Peninsula could look to Salinas. I don’t think that will be without much conflict in Salinas. But you know Salinas schools are struggling by a lot of measures, but they’re still doing much better than before. You know I’m not sure people locally recognize the extent to which Cal State Monterey Bay, if it can continue to grow and get better, is a game changer locally. I’d also argue that culturally and economically all the business around food has never been bigger in this country.
The 20 part multi-media project features many pieces written by locals. The people Mathews and his team looked too because they know Salinas best. They reflect on the city today and ideas for the future.
He says the takeaway locally should be positive, but the rest of California needs to be concerned about having so many cities similar in size to Salinas. The once small towns that grew into cities with urban problems like Stockton, San Bernardino and Bakersfield.
JM: But they don’t have local governments that are equal to the challenge of dealing with urban issues. And then California has sort of a famously centralized governing system where local governments don’t have a lot of power to raise revenues and do long term planning. So much is done from Sacramento that even ambitious places are not really fully in control of their own destiny.
So I asked him, what Californians could do to address the problems of these midsized cities.
JM: That’s an enormously long conversation that goes from everything from the whole Prop 13 system that’s grown up over 40 years and undoing a lot of that. You know Prop 13 is fundamentally about saying locals can’t raise taxes, people have to do it or Sacramento has to do it. But it’s also about having ways to do things. In the last couple of years the redevelopment agencies were eliminated in California. Those had their problems, but there’s nothing really that’s risen it it’s place to give cities the ability to do long term investment and planning.